


And Other Lies

by evilythedwarf



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-15
Updated: 2013-08-15
Packaged: 2017-12-23 14:13:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/927451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evilythedwarf/pseuds/evilythedwarf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Snow goes through the wardrobe and Emma grows up in a world without magic.Twenty-eight years is a long time to hang on to hope.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Other Lies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [angel_in_tears](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=angel_in_tears).



Emma’s mother makes dresses. The most beautiful dresses. The kind of dresses princesses wear in fairytales. Or in the theatre. Mostly she works making costumes for the theatre, but sometimes, when it’s dark outside and Emma can’t sleep, she sits next to her mother on the couch and watches her draw. What her mother really wants to do, Emma knows, is make wedding dresses, because that’s what she draws, over and over again.

 

 

 

 

She really doesn’t want to go to school, but she makes a friend. Her name is Vanessa and her parents are organic farmers. Vanessa gives her an apple, once. A shiny red apple that looks so perfect it can’t possibly be real. Emma hasn’t even touched an apple before in her life so she carries it back home on her lunchbox to share it with her mom, but when she gives it to her, Mary Margaret barely touches it before gasping and dropping it, like it burns, and then she hugs Emma really hard and tells her never to accept gifts from strangers.

 

 

 

 

Emma’s mother is very pretty and she’s also the coolest mom anyone could ever have. Everyone says so. She never has to go to bed early if she doesn’t want to, she can have hot chocolate for dinner, and sometimes when it’s nice outside, she can stay home from school and they will go to the park and watch the birds and the squirrels. Emma’s not sure but she thinks that, when she was smaller, her mother used to whisper to the bluebirds that would come and rest on her open palm. These days, she mostly just sits on a bench and watches as Emma tries to climb to the highest trees, never telling her to be careful.

 

“Do you even care if I fall down and die?” Emma asks once, annoyed because a woman just walked past them pushing a stroller and she looked at them with pity and contempt, like Mary Margaret is such a terrible mother and Emma is a little savage that needs to be restrained. She knows those looks, she’s been getting them more and more lately. She’s nine years old and her mother is prettier and younger than all the other moms and sometimes Emma wishes she’d stopped being so cool and acted a little more normal.

 

“I know you won’t fall,” her mother says. “I trust you.”

 

And Emma feels very bad for wishing her mother would be anyone but who she is.

 

 

 

 

_When she turns six, Emma’s mother tells her about her dad. It is a big secret, her mom says. She tells her about the curse and how Emma is so special she is the only one who can ever break it._

_“How do you know?” she asks, again and again. “How do you know it has to be **me**?”_

_“I just know, baby. A mother knows.”_

 

 

 

 

Vanessa’s parents divorce, and then her mother marries a man who makes cloth shoes or something and they have to move to Ohio.

 

“Are you going to get married again?” Emma asks.

 

“Oh, Emma. Your father loves us. Wherever he is, he loves him. And that’s enough to last me a lifetime.”

 

Emma thinks that doesn’t sound like enough. Doesn’t feel like enough, either. Her mother believes in true love, though. The once in a lifetime kind. When she talks about Emma’s dad, she glows. Literally glows. Sitting in the middle of their favorite park bench, holding Emma’s hand between hers, she talks about the day they married and she glows a soft golden hue. Nobody else sees but them, and that’s how Emma knows it’s all true, as much as it hurts.

 

 

 

 

Neal might be her true love, she thinks. Not like her parents, but real, present. Here. When he’s near, she feels like maybe she will one day be the savior, like she is strong enough to do anything in the world. Like she can fight dragons and conquer mountains, even if she will never have to because really, that’s starting to sound more and more like her mother’s making it up to make her feel better about not having a dad. Like she will meet her father and look him in the eye and he will be so proud of her, and they will finally be a family. She feels like she can do all this and more, and it doesn’t matter her teachers and the other kids in school tell her he is bad news. It doesn’t matter that the vice-principal called her mother and told her she’s cutting class and an older guy is picking her up outside of school every afternoon. Nothing matters but how much she loves him, and the way he makes her laugh.

 

She comes home one day, after being out all night, and it’s about 5 minutes before the sun comes up. Her mother is waiting for her, reading a book in the kitchen, something sweet-smelling simmering on the stove.

 

“I’m sorry,” is the first thing out of Emma’s mouth, even though she’s not.

 

Her mother just looks at her for the longest time. Then she smiles. “I trust you,” she tells her.

 

 

 

 

Her mother smells like cinnamon and freshly cut grass. Like a garden right after it rains. She’s sweet and kind and beautiful and everyone loves her, and Emma loves her more than anyone else, but sometimes she wants to punch her in the face.

 

She looks at her like she’s the greatest thing in the world, like she’s the smartest, most important person on this earth. She looks at Emma like she will save the world just by existing and it’s just too much pressure. Her mother expects her to save the world and she can’t even save herself. It’s her eighteenth birthday and she’s pregnant, and when her mother starts to tell her how special she is and how much her father loved her, Emma screams.

 

“What did true love ever get you?” And she might as well have punched her. Mary Margaret looks like she can’t possibly believe this. “Was it worth it? **Love**? If all you ever got out of it was me, would that be enough? Will I ever be enough for you, just me, if I can’t break the curse, mother, will you just love **me**?”

 

And then her mother holds her until she can stop shaking and sobbing.

 

She is gone the next morning. Leaves a note on the fridge, saying she’s sorry.

 

 

 

 

_Emma is four years old and her skin hums when she’s happy. When she’s tired after playing all morning in the sand, and her belly is full of watermelon and lemonade, when there’s nothing in the world that could possibly go wrong, her skin hums and she thinks maybe she would float away if her mom’s strong arms weren’t wrapped around her. Her mother looks at her and smiles, and whispers love, love, love on her hair. “You are true love’s child,” she tells her, and Emma nestles against her and falls asleep._

 

 

 

 

The baby moves all the time. It keeps her awake at night and so she spends the time she should be sleeping studying for her SATs. She misses her mother all the time, and she wonders if this is what she felt like when she was pregnant with her. If little Fetus!Emma also kept her awake at nights, if she craved bananas and raspberry tea. She wonders if they even had bananas on the Enchanted Forest and is sorry she never asked.

 

_“Mom:_

_I can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry._

_Love,_

_Emma”_

 

 

 

 

It’s always been just Emma and her mom. When she was very young, before she knew about the curse even, she used to think her life was perfect. She was happy all the time, she didn’t need a reason to smile. She needed nothing but what she had and she didn’t have to be anything but who she was. Just Emma and her mom and it was perfect.

 

It wasn’t enough though. It was never enough, and Little Emma might have not seen it, but now she knows. All those missing pieces, and the hopeful look on her mother’s eyes, and the places in her life that were just empty, and hearing her mother cry herself to sleep. She can’t do that again. She can’t have a child and give them the same life she had. She is not brave enough, nor strong enough to love someone as much as her mother loves her. She may only be seventeen but she knows her baby’s best chance is not with her.

 

 

 

 

She comes back home and her mother holds her tightly. “It doesn’t matter,” she tells her. “Honey, it doesn’t matter, you’re here.”

 

She holds her so tight, like that day with the apple and Emma cries and cries until she falls asleep, and then she cries again, and it seems like she doesn’t stop crying and hurting until she goes away to college a year later. By then she’s no longer scared of being alone, she’s no longer scared of anything. She feels empty all the time, like she’s hollowed out. Like she’s made of wood. Like she can carve out piece after piece out of her heart and it will not make a difference.

 

 

 

 

College is sort of fun. She drinks a lot, and there are a lot of guys, but mostly she spends her time trying to forget his big eyes and the way his soft brown hair felt under her fingers.

 

 

 

 

She doesn’t even tell her mother about the baby for years, and when she does, when she tells her about holding him in her arms and looking at him, and counting his little fingers and his little toes, and the perfect shell of his ears, and his little chin, pointy even with his newborn baby fat _and he kinda looked like you, Mom_. When she tells her mother all these things, she has no more tears left to cry and her mother’s promises of happily ever afters are nothing but silly childhood tales.

 

She lives in the real world. She has a real, if dangerous, job, and she makes enough money that her mother doesn’t have to saw dresses for strangers anymore but late at night, when she comes home from another bust, she sees her mother has fallen asleep in the couch waiting for her and she finds old sketchbooks full of fluffy white dresses clasped tight in her hands and she knows her mother hasn’t given up on her yet.

 

 

 

 

She works and she comes home, and occasionally she goes out, and time goes by. She turns twenty-three and twenty-four and twenty-five, and it’s fine. It’s a good enough life, she thinks. But then his birthday will come around and she’ll drink a little too much, and get into too many unnecessary fights, and punch more people in the face than probably deserve it, and she’ll tell herself she doesn’t feel anything at all.

 

 

 

 

They argue a lot, these days. Emma has a gun and more scars than she can count. She stares at the worst of the human race in the face every day but her mother still believes that one day she’ll find her true love again, and everything will be better.

                                                      

“What’s so wrong with our life now?” Emma asks, but Mary-Margaret just smiles tiredly and sighs, and Emma feels like punching her in the face again because why can’t she see that Emma will never be what she wants her to be.

 

 

 

 

The day she turns twenty-eight, she wakes up to her mother sitting next to her and staring.

 

“Oh, Emma,” she says and Emma bolts from bed and throws on whatever is on the floor from the night before. She avoids her mother all day. She comes home wearing a dress she hates and shoes that she’s convinced are trying to murder her, and her mother is waiting for her, a blueberry muffin with a single candle on it on the kitchen counter.

 

“Come on!” she yells. “Aren’t you tired? Don’t you want to just stop? Please stop.”

 

“Oh, Emma,” she says. “You have to know.”

 

“Please. Mom, please just stop,” she begs, and it’s maybe the first time in ten years she’s crying but she’s just so tired.

 

“Honey, it’s **you**. It’s always been you.”

 

“How do you know?” Emma asks through her tears.

 

Her mother gently cups her face, brushing her cheek with her thumb.

 

“I believe in you,” she tells Emma.

 

 

 

 

There’s a knock on the door. Emma stands up, takes a deep breath and presses the heels of her hands against her eyes. She opens the door.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This was so hard! I tried to give them a nice life but apparently, my brain doesn't think Emma can have nice things and this ended up being a such a sad!fest. Still there's Henry at the end, right? And Snow never ever looses hope! And Emma is pretty much in the same place emotionally than at the start of the show. This story brought up ALL KINDS OF FEELS for this fandom and now I want so badly to write like a thousand other different AUs. Or maybe just a couple more but still. I will examine that in depth and with luck, I'll have something out before S3 joss's the hell out of them.
> 
> Thanks for reading!!!


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